She walked over to her laptop while everything was working in the kitchen and brought up her notes. She remembered one of the organizers she’d spoken to on that job and quickly brought up any emails pertaining to it. “Andy Noster,” she said. “That was his name. He was a Sydney native.”
“Spell it?”
“N-o-s-t-e-r,” she said. “He was eighteen.”
“We’ll check into it,” they said.
She nodded and read through a bunch of emails. “The organizers weren’t very happy either,” she said. “They hadn’t expected as many people to attend. The venue itself was too small for that number of attendees, and security had had to be brought in to help control the crowd.”
“Right. Got it,” Nico said.
She left him to it now that she had found the email that was bothering her and went back to the kitchen. As she thought about it though, she remembered some talk about him being an only child. She went back to her notes, since she had done plenty of research into his death at the time. And there, staring at her, was something that she hadn’t wanted to contemplate. “He was an only child,” she said.
“And who’s the mother?”
“Angela Noster and her husband was Daniel Noster.”
“So, not a Maggie?” Nico said. “Have you got an image of the mother?”
Charlotte quickly flicked through, brought up a photo, and then nodded. With a sigh of relief, she said, “It’s not her.” She twisted the laptop so he could see the image of the parents.
“Good enough,” he said.
Smiling and feeling somewhat better, she finally left her laptop and went to the kitchen. Of course that didn’t mean that Maggie wasn’t still somehow connected. But chances were good it wasn’t related to the death of that boy. When the pasta water boiled, she added salt and threw in the pasta. She hoped it was enough for four people. She didn’t even know if her brother ate pasta, but it was too late to ask him now.
She kept sneaking looks at him, surprised—stunned maybe was a better word—to see him sitting here casually with the other two men. And yet he was so at home with this work. After all he’d gone through, he’d grown up into a hell of a man, and all she could remember was that freckle-faced kid who she tried to protect all the time. But he’d had a hell of a temper and always acted out. She’d turned and leaned back against the stove with the pasta bubbling behind her. “Joshua, how did you deal with all that anger?”
He looked up at her, and the smile that whispered across his face was more sad than happy. “Remember that depressed and suicidal time period I spoke about earlier?”
She nodded.
“Yeah, that was my answer when the violence wouldn’t get me where I wanted to go. I got suicidal.”
“And was it all because of Mom and Dad?”
“That was a lot of it. It was the loss of the home that we’d had, and then, when I lost you too, I became very violent. Finally I came out of that depressed period. However, realizing that I wasn’t hurting anybody but myself, and nothing was changing, even though I was constantly angry, they put me on a bunch of drugs to help calm me down. I finally stopped taking the drugs, and then I got very depressed again, so they wanted to give me more drugs. And I realized that the drugs weren’t helping me any, so I stopped them. Yet I still hated my life and still hated the fact that our parents were gone, and you were gone, and I was all alone.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I kept asking them where you were and what happened to you and why I couldn’t see you, but I never got any answers.”
“The foster care system sucks,” he said. “And, when siblings are separated, which they try not to do supposedly, it’s almost impossible to reconnect again.”
“I agree with that,” she said. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t there for you.”
He stared at her, surprise lighting up his dark eyes. He put his phone down, stood, and walked toward her, then held out his hands. She put hers immediately in his. “It’s not your fault,” he said quietly. “I don’t want you to feel guilty that we were separated.”
“Too late,” she said, tears choking her throat. “I cried myself to sleep for years. And then I got angry. And then I just became detached. It’s like I put a veil between me and the rest of the world, so I didn’t have to deal with too much of it.”
“You’ve had a lot of sadness in your life, haven’t you?”
“And a lot of anger and a lot of emotions I couldn’t deal with,” she said.
“You married?”
“Married and widowed. That was a bad deal for him and for me. And more guilt piled in on top.”
“And you wouldn’t feel as much guilt, except you’re already carrying a lot from our childhood,” he said. “I hope you don’t think you had anything to do with Mom and Dad’s accident.”
“You know what? I don’t even remember most of the details. I remember it was a car accident, and we survived, and they didn’t.”
“That’s about the best way to look at it too,” he said. “As far as I understand, it was a collision with a drunk driver. But, other than that, who knows.”
She smiled. “We could find the files, I suppose, if we cared.”
“When I went undercover, they were buried,” he said.
She laughed. “Okay. So apparently I got buried too, didn’t I?”
“No,” he
